On Thu, Jan 03, 2013 at 02:25:36PM +0100, Dave Neary wrote:
For everyone else: this involved developers being asked, and at least verbally affirming, that they have written the patch themselves and have the rights required to publish their work under the relevant license.
A CLA gets around this by having an explicit Contributor Licensing Agreement where developers explicitly grant a license to some entity (usually the project's sponsoring entity or a non-profit supporting the project).
I don't consider it correct to see a CLA as "getting around" what the DCO does. The DCO (in typical form) and (typical) CLAs are doing different, though overlapping, things.
Both Mozilla and the Kernel, and several other projects, have avoided a CLA for a number of reasons - if you're aiming for a diverse developer base (as we are in oVirt) this can slow down adoption and participation by 3rd parties. For that reason, I would not encourage the adoption of a CLA for oVirt.
Since at this point the only logical explicit inbound licensee entity for a (conventional) CLA would seem to be Red Hat, I would also note more strongly that Red Hat refuses to be the named inbound licensee for a CLA for oVirt. This issue was dealt with at the inception of oVirt. - RF